Riddick’s Folly

Riddick’s Folly is a restored Greek Revival house constructed in 1837 by Mills Riddick, grandson of local Revolutionary War hero Willis Riddick. Because of its enormous size, with 21 rooms and 16 fireplaces, and its avant garde Greek Revival architecture, contemporaries ridiculed it and gave it the name Riddick’s Folly. Its distinctive design includes Flemish gables, five eyebrow windows below the eaves, and interior carved cypress woodwork. During the Civil War, Mills’s son Nathaniel and his wife Missouri lived there with their six children until Union forces occupied Suffolk in 1862 and forced the family to evacuate. The house then became the headquarters of Maj. Gen. John James Peck, commander of the Union division controlling the Suffolk area, who used it intermittently from September 8, 1862, to August 1, 1863, before being appointed commander of the Union district of North Carolina. The large house also served as a hospital for sick and wounded Union soldiers, and many penciled messages and autographs they wrote on the walls have been preserved and remain legible. After the Confederate threat to Suffolk ended and Union troops evacuated the town in November 1865, the family returned to find the house completely looted, with only a single chair remaining.

Suffolk, Virginia · United States